Yenya's World

Mon, 09 Jan 2006

HDD crashes

On Wednesday, the HDD in my workstation crashed - firstly it looked like
a flaky cable (I rebooted the system), but after few minutes (while doing
an emergency backup) the drive disconnected from the bus and never came back.
I tried to do a classical refridgerator resuscitation, but I was only
able to make the drive visible on the bus, but it did not spin up.

Fortunately, I had a few weeks old backup on my secondary HDD (did you know
that cp -lR and a local rsync can make a decent
HDD-based backup system?). O&G managed
to deliver a new HDD the next day, so I am moving my system back to the
usable state.

It is interesting how a not so big company like O&G can often provide
better support/replacement parts than big players like HP, IBM, or even SGI,
and for much less money.

In the meantime, the same drive in Odysseus failed the
S.M.A.R.T. self-test. I have removed it from the RAID-5 array and inserted
it back, and it synchronized itself correctly. A subsequent self-test was
OK as well (and no sectors were relocated), so I hope the drive will work
correctly. I already have a set of new HDDs and a 3ware SATA controller
for Odysseus, but I simply do not have time to do the upgrade.